Archive for July, 2007
Redeeming history
Below is a summary of the events in Mississippi and Louisiana from 1874 to 1876 that lead to Adelbert Ames giving up the governorship and the Republican party losing the south. After reading this timeline in Lemann’s book, which is fleshed out considerably with narratives of the confrontations, I was aghast. Whites in the South saw blacks through the lens of fear and racial prejudice. They justified violence with the notion of self-defense, which is mind-boggling.
And yet, it seems that it is only recently that historians have written the story of these years in a way that doesn’t glorify the South. (For the record, my high school education was in Maryland which, while technically a Southern state, is an odd mix, having been kept from secession.) Even paragons of liberal thinking such as Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy are guilty of defending these violent actions. For example, JFK wrote Profiles in Courage, in which he investigated Lucius Lamar. Lamar was a catalyst for these violent events, prejudiced against blacks, and demonstrated himself to be a two-faced opportunist. Profiles in Courage focused upon the increase in taxation upon Mississippi, and claimed that Reconstruction was "a black nightmare the South could never forget."
This came from the president who was at the helm during our nation’s civil rights movement, and who is often lionized himself for being progressive and a champion of African-Americans. Lemann points out that JFK was put in a similar position as Grant, being asked to send troops to Mississippi to enforce order. JFK, unlike Grant, does. He was, as well, confronted with his erroneous descriptions of Reconstruction by one of Adelbert Ames’ children (Blanche Ames), who wrote Kennedy. He said he would do further research in case the book went through another printing. It went through several and no changes were made. Blanche Ames was the grandmother of Georges Ames Plimpton, who was a friend of the Kennedys. Kennedy asked Plimpton to have his grandmother stop writing him about the book.
As for Woodrow Wilson, he held a White House screening of the notorious The Birth of a Nation, and commented "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."
With that in mind, below is an outline of the events which liberal scholars and officeholders used to laud as an inspiring effort to resist heavy taxation and defend freedom.
“Redeeming” the South
At lunch break today I finished Redemption by Nicholas Lemann. I closed the book and sat in silence for a few minutes. Along with A Briefer History of Time, this narrative has been slowly changing the way I view my world, and the closing chapter was a stunner.
What I’d like to do in the next few posts is give an outline of the history Lemann tells, and sketch a few of the major figures. Then I’ll talk about what impacted me so much in the last chapter. My next bit of history to research is the growth of the two major political parties in the US. As you’ll see, for the Democrats to be the assumed party of African-Americans is a pretty major change from the way things were in the aftermath of the Civil War.
The Historical Context
Lemann starts the book in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. The Civil War is (ostensibly) over, General Grant is president for a second term, and Louisiana is in turmoil over its recent election. It was close, probably due to ballot fraud, and both Democrats and Republicans claim they won. Federal troops install Republicans, including a few black officeholders. A black deputy sheriff (Republican) named William Ward and a white deputy sheriff (Democrat) named Columbus Nash are then bickering over which of them should get control over the local police. Ultimately, the Republicans break into the courthouse in order to install Ward. Against this backdrop, Lemann tells the following story:
Recommendation
I’ve been listening to Stephen Hawking’s "A Briefer History of Time" via audiobook on my commutes and recommend it if you’re interested in physics or the history of science. It also shortens my commute time, per the General Theory of Relativity.
Benhabib
In trying to get background for my course (and my own interests in epistemology, the self and gender), I came across Seyla Benhabib (Yale). Apparently, she’s been influenced by Jurgen Habermas. I’m taking a course at Loyola on Habermas in the fall, so I’ll have some background on her influence later. But the reason I want to read this particular feminist philosopher is because, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, she is "committed to viewing people as socially situated, interpersonally bonded, and embodied…[and] also committed to the feasibility of rational philosophical justification for universal norms."
Instead of arguing that the multiple narratives constituting our selves means that the idea of a self is incoherent, Benhabib says that because we can reflect on these narratives, we have a "core capacity to describe and reflect on one’s experience." Again, this connects back to Christine Korsgaard’s intuition about human reflexivity being essential for ethics.
Anyway, I’ll have to wait to dive into her work, but anyone with other suggestions, leave them in comments. I’ll be using the bibliography in that article and another one
(I have to thank Brit and the commenter at her blog for sending me to these resources.)
Image: Situating the Self, by Seyla Benhabib.
Moslems and freedom
Call it futile, call it watching a train wreck, call it what you will, but I read blogs like this one, lurk on message boards like this, and keep track of Christians that I share common ground with and vehemently oppose.
The blog entry I’m going to talk about today was written by KDNY–I don’t know if he aims to be anonymous online, so I won’t use his real name. He and I overlapped in seminary (as did Dru, another frequent Christian commenter here) and I stumbled on his blog about a year ago. Normally I don’t dive into comments, because I consider it like interrupting a conversation (I’m not his intended audience). But this post amazed me:
Islam is an idolatrous and wicked religion. They are not a "great" religion, but a terrible religion that needs to be opposed at every turn. From a Christian standpoint the answer is the Gospel. That they need to repent of their idolatry and turn to Christ, and this cannot be done via U.S. government. Yet, the civil magistrates should consider banning Islam and Moslems from public office.
The context for KDNY’s comments is Rep. Keith Ellison’s comparison of Bush to Hitler in a speech given to Atheists for Human Rights. Read the rest of this entry »
Redemption
Sometimes I read a book that uncovers my ignorance about history. Redemption is one of those books. For example, in the prologue I learned about the Colfax Massacre, a horrific event following the end of the Civil War, in which townspeople in Louisiana killed about a hundred blacks rather than allow a mixed race, Republican, local government to take power.
I remember, in middle school or high school, whenever I learned about the Civil War, that the Southern States resisted the efforts to integrate blacks, and that they called Northerners who came down to help "carpetbaggers." That’s about the extent of what I learned. Somehow, I thought that the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists came later.
This book is one of two supplemental texts for Sharon Welch’s Postcolonialism course, so you’ll see a summary later. I’d recommend checking it out, though, if you’re at all interested in history, the Civil War, or race relations. For this naive reader, it’s proving eye opening.
Also, if you read Arbitrary Marks for explicitly philosophical (i.e. ahistorical, analytic) content, don’t worry. There will be more to come. I am hoping to dive into topics of the self, consciousness, and epistemology following this class. Right now, I’m adjusting to my new commute (two hours total each day), so I’m a bit wiped out for blogging.
Ethics and the self
For my course with Sharon Welch (that is rapidly approaching), I have to choose two books from a list of selections, to supplement the eight required texts. One of the books I picked is Engaged Buddhism in the West, a selection of essays edited by Christopher Queen. Aside from the sociological and historical tidbits that I’ve been learning from the volume, I’m interested in the relationship with conceptions of the self and ethical frameworks. Welch lauds Engaged Buddhism in After Empire, but she has her own ethical framework based upon a postmodern conception of the self–as "creatures of social and political forces that exist outside of us" (Sweet Dreams in America xxi). Engaged Buddhists, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, understand the self/other distinction to be illusory, and urge compassion based upon this doctrine of "inter-being."
Further, both ethical systems have an ambivalent relationship with "Western" ethics. Welch begins Sweet Dreams in America stating that she wants to navigate between Kantian expectations and continental limitations. While in a few places, she speaks approvingly of figures like Kant and John Rawls, in After Emprire, she criticizes both for succumbing to methods which require the fiction of an autonomous, rational individual. Engaged Buddhism is, some claim, indebted to Protestant and liberation theology for its emphasis upon social action. And it is popular in Western countries like America, Great Britain and Australia. But at the same time, the ethics of Engaged Buddhism arises out of "self-cultivation" and not an attachment to a particular universal law, deity or a set of consquences.
Sharon Welch: After Empire
In the preface to After Empire, Sharon Welch describes the purpose of her book: “[to] explore our story as Americans and propose a vision of national power that is rooted in the best of our values and aspirations as well as in the worst of our excesses and brutality” (xiv). To create this vision, she draws upon Native American spiritualities (specifically the “Beauty Way”), and Engaged Buddhism. The overarching theme through the book is that as human beings, we are limited in our perspective and capable of both cruelty and nobility. Specifically, as Americans, we must face these themes in how we’ve interacted with Native American peoples.
As in Sweet Dreams in America, epistemology is central to Welch’s proposal. She contends that we could have learned from the Lakota, the Cherokee, and other peoples who had radically different ways of viewing the world. Unfortunately, Western assumptions blinded us from appreciating the “polycentric” epistemology of the Native Americans. Citing Jace Weaver, Welch argues that this epistemology is contrasted with the “universal, generalizeable, knowable by all rational people, and conceptual” truth of the West. It is, instead, an “understanding of truth as multiple; it is meaningful and grounded in a place, a region, a community of peoples and ecosystems” (60-61). The benefit of such truth is that is embodied (through Native American ceremonies and rituals), multiple (not shying away from conflict and paradox), and leads to sharing historically grounded truths through narrative.
All of this sounds as if Native peoples were the world’s first postmodernists, anticipating Derrida by several hundred (or thousand) years. Read the rest of this entry »
Question: Emergent and Engaged
For those of you who have expertise: has anyone done comparative studies between the Emergent Church movement and Engaged Buddhism? I’m reading about the latter for a class and I think I see (at least superficial) similarities. Thoughts? (A Google search came up short as did an ATLA religion database search.)
Back to gender
Seeing this news story, I realized I haven’t gone back to Female Masculinity like I had hoped. Even the titles that the news services used were provocative: was the lesbian woman named Khadijah Farmer ejected from the woman’s bathroom because she "looked like a man", "was too masculine", or "was too butch"? I thought it was interesting that the gay news organizations went with "too butch", Fox News with "too masculine" and the Metro UK with "like a man." (Incidentally, there’s an image at Fox News of the woman, so you can judge for yourself whether she fits any of the above descriptions.)
Now I’m not going to go overboard in analyzing headlines–they’re picked by editors based on grabbing readers’ attention. Yet the convergence of "butch", "masculine" and "male/man" is what Halberstam is questioning in her book. The other snippet from the story that connects to her discussion is the bouncer’s response to Farmer when she offered to provide ID demonstrating she was a woman: "that’s neither here nor there."
At least in this instance, the problem was Farmer’s failure to fit into some expected norms, and the discomfort of the other women in that space.